


K for Kowalski

by feroxargentea



Category: due South
Genre: Case Fic, First Time, M/M, due South Seekrit Santa Challenge, it's mostly about the hair, the inevitability of Canadian shacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-02-28 00:46:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2712779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s a love story, right? Hearts and flowers. Blood and feathers. Whatever.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	K for Kowalski

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Queue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Queue/gifts).



> **Continuity note:** Forget _Call of the Wild_. Dog-sledding into the sunset, that’s cute, that’s a fairytale. This is what really happened. Maybe.
> 
> With thanks and love: to alltoseek, best and most patient of American betas; to Alcyone301, unofficial Canadian Consultant; and of course to cj2017, who always remembers things differently.  
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

 

 

**“It’s a love story, right? Hearts and flowers. Blood and feathers. Whatever.”**

**— Ray Kowalski**

***

“You know the interesting thing about ducks?” Ray says, as he and Fraser pull up outside the 27th.

Fraser considers for a moment. “That would depend on which particular species you had in mind, Ray. Which reminds me of when—rather a humorous story, actually—my Great-Uncle Albert was fishing one time out on Wildcat Lake and—”

Ray slams the car door. “On the clock, here, Frase, I don’t got time for Clan Fraser anecdotes. You know the interesting thing about _rubber_ ducks?”

Fraser abandons the tale. In any case, he thinks he might have related it once already. It’s been two years now, and he’s not accustomed to being partnered with anyone this long, not used to keeping tabs. Plus, even if the story’s been told before, he’s not entirely sure which Ray was listening at the time – assuming that either of them ever listened.

“Well, I did read a fascinating report last week about the decay rates of pelagic debris,” he says, following Ray into the bullpen. “According to the article, following the wreck of a toy-carrying cargo vessel literally millions of plastic ducks and duck fragments have been circumnavigating the globe for years and can still be found trapped in a system known as the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, which—”

“Fraser, shut up.”

“Understood.”

“I’ll _tell_ you the interesting thing about rubber ducks. The interesting thing about rubber ducks is, they got hollow bits.”

Fraser nods and tries to look interested.

“Hollow bits,” Ray continues, “that you can hide shit in. ’Cause who the hell uses toys as packing material? Nobody. That would be nuts.”

“Have you considered that it might be a form of recycling? Up in the north, it would be the usual practice to attempt to find a secondary use for anything not otherwi—”

“Like I said, nuts.” Ray grabs a file from his overflowing desk. “Nah, you got ducks, you gotta have a reason for ducks. We stick those toys from the Saulino warehouse crates into the labs, I’m betting you we get traces of something. Coke, meth, something.”

“Possibly.”

“‘Possibly’? ‘ _Possibly’?_ What is that, don’t give me that, Fraser, there ain’t no ‘possibly’. I got a hunch. C’mon, we gotta get this shit to Evidence.”

***

**I knew the undercover gig. Man, I rocked the undercover. Done it four times before, four guys that were me and weren’t me. Piece of goddamn cake. I got that whole sense of identity thing hammered out, plus I had a wife to go home to after my nine-to-five of not being me. And sure, there’s fuckups you gotta skate round: getting too involved, getting handsy with the chicks, family stuff, yada yada yada. But like I say, I had a wife knew who I was, and I got double time, and that put her through law school.**

**After the divorce came through, not so easy.**

**“So, go be this guy Ray Vecchio for a while,” they said. “It’s low risk, low stress. He was at the two-seven, needs his cover kept clean. Just work the cases and go home. His partner there, he’s kind of a freak, but he’s harmless. He and Vecchio were thick as thieves, so he’ll be kinda lost on his own. Just keep an eye on him, okay, Kowalski? It’s a cinch. Don’t sweat it.”**

**So they hand over the ass-covering papers, the ain’t-our-fault can’t-sue-us legal crap. Sign here, sign there, sign my fucking life away again, I’m Ray Vecchio.**

**They warned me Fraser was a freak. They didn’t warn me _I’d_ be the one to get lost.**

***

“Hey, Vecchio, over here! Constable Fraser too, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Lieutenant Welsh herds them into his office and shuts the door.

“So, I got this lady in,” he says. “Politico’s wife, big money, big power, bullshit problem. I need you to go take her statement, and you’re gonna take it real polite, okay?”

Ray rolls his eyes, mutters something about workloads and ducks.

“What, you need a written request?” Welsh says. “This ain’t a request, detective. She wants a fellow Italian, and right now that means you, God help us all. So you’re gonna take Constable Fraser along with you, and you’re gonna do like he does and talk like he does. Polite-like.” He taps his nose theatrically. “Watch and learn, detective, watch and learn.”

“I’m polite,” Ray says. “I’m always polite. Ray ‘Politeness’ Vecchio, that’s me. I got ID.”

Welsh picks up a sheet of foolscap and pretends to read from it. “Highest complaints the station’s ever gotten in a week: Detective Vecchio. Highest complaints in a year: Detective Vecchio. Only detective who ever got a complaint from his own sister—”

“Hey! I’m not...” Ray leans forward, lowers his voice. “She’s not my... And, and, she started it!”

“Your family, your problem. This time you’re not gonna offend nobody. Got it?”

Ray huffs. There’s a bit of goose-down stuck to his T-shirt just below his gun harness, between his shoulder blades, and Fraser could brush it off if he reached out. He clasps his hands behind his own back and waits.

“Just don’t make me have to fire your ass,” Welsh says wearily. “Go, go.”

And they go.

***

**Yeah, I remember the Saulino case. Gotta be fourteen—wait, fifteen years back now. Christ, when did I get that old? Not gonna forget that one, though, last case and all.**

**They had this dumbass craze going round the students at the university that month: tarring and feathering. You ever do that? Catch people, roll them in tar, coat them in feathers. It was Chicago State campus versus the road crews, and we got to deal with the complaints, ’cause we had nothing better to do, right? Plumage stuck in the pavement, at least two genuine live freshmen stuck in the pavement, the bullpen full of guys in hi-vis. Freefloating feathers everywhere. Same old.**

**I think about the Saulino case now, I think feathers. Feathers and blood.**

***

The lady in question turns out to be Mrs Legorno, a familiar face from the news reports. Not so familiar at the station, though, because no sane man would mess with the wife of Luigi “Legs” Legorno, mayoral candidate and owner of half downtown. She’s busy trying to smooth flecks of something white off of her pencil skirt, but she abandons the attempt and turns her beaming campaign smile on Fraser and Ray as they enter the interview room.

“Hi. Detective Vecchio,” Ray mumbles. “This is, er, Constable Fraser.” After a tiny but appreciable pause he remembers to add, “Ma’am.”

“We understand, ma’am,” Fraser cuts in smoothly, “that you have a crime to report?”

“I do indeed. A theft, constable. A theft of an extremely valuable...” She pauses, swiping at a floating white scrap as it lands on her blouse. “An extremely valuable...” Her lips twitch violently, and all at once she drops the cultured act. “Hey, what the hell is it with all the damn feathers around this place?”

“Our apologies for any inconvenience you might encounter, ma’am,” Fraser says. “There was a certain plumage-related incident yesterday and, well, for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, we”—he feels Ray kick his ankle—“That is, to cut a long story short, Diefenbaker has spent all morning attempting to secure the fallout, but there might be sections of the station where the task is as yet incomplete. As you may perceive.”

Mrs Legorno considers him for a while. Then she narrows her eyes and turns to Ray instead. “A theft,” she says firmly, “of an _extremely_ valuable recipe, one my family has guarded for _generations_. Lieutenant Welsh is affording it full priority. He informs me you’re the best resources he has, that you’ll get the guy. He gave me his personal assurance of that.”

“What, wait, wait”—Ray drums on the table with a belligerent finger—“you lost a _recipe?_ You came here to report a _recipe?_ You’re shitting me.”

Mrs Legorno is not, young man, shitting him. She relates the history to them in full – the recipe’s history, plus her family’s history, plus a CliffsNotes history of Italy right back to the seventeenth century in case they’d missed it, which Fraser suspects Ray just might have.

Ray isn’t listening. “Tomato sauce?” he says. “Tomato sauce is just tomatoes and, and, and sauce. Who the hell’s gonna steal—”

“Well, that’s not strictly true, Ray,” Fraser puts in. “I believe the ingredients can vary considerably from region to region, and then you have to consider that the precise balance of herbs could make all the difference, not to mention the particular cultivars of tomato one might employ.”

Mrs Legorno nods at him and shoots a glare of vindication at Ray.

“So, so, okay, so let’s get this straight, okay?” Ray is six-cups wired already, although Fraser knows for a fact that he’s only had one, because it was Fraser who had to call at his apartment, drag him out of bed, and hand him the coffee. “You had this valuable recipe, cookbook, whatever, missing since what, Tuesday evening, right? So who had access to your kitchen that night?”

“Me and my husband,” Mrs Legorno says. “And the chef, but he don’t count.”

“You got a chef? Riiight, you got a chef. Why don’t he count?”

“Tommy?” Mrs Legorno snorts. “He wouldn’t dare, I know his ma. Besides, it was after he went home. I heard something downstairs, told Luigi to go down and check. He said he was busy. Men! So I grabbed a golf club and went down. Nothing there, nothing broken, I’m thinking I must’ve dreamt it, and then just outside of the window I saw—”

“Wait, hold up, you actually saw something?”

“Not something. Someone. Got a good look at the guy, and I never forget a face.”

“Fine. Fine. Stay there. Okay? Stay there. Back in five.” Ray bounds out.

Mrs Legorno looks disdainfully round the room and then back to Fraser. “So what’s the what here?” she says. “’Cause, Detective Vecchio my ass. I don’t give a damn what his momma told him, if that guy’s Italian I’m the Queen of Sheba. And I ain’t never been to Sheba.”

“Well, ma’am, they do say it’s a wise man who knows his own father,” Fraser says. “In this case, however, I have the pleasure to be acquainted with the detective’s mother, and I believe her honor to be beyond question.”

She sniffs. “So he’s some kinda throwback. Still, you thought of getting him some Ritalin or something? Because he ain’t right, y’know, ain’t healthy. Gonna have himself an aneurysm one of these days. My sister’s kid, he got that ADHD whadjma, y’know? And he calmed right down when they got him on that Ritalin stuff. You could slip it in his coffee.”

Fraser’s about to launch into a discussion on the ethics of drugging one’s partner with anything other than caffeine when Ray crashes back into the room, police artist in tow.

“Paper, pencils, check,” he says. “Just tell him what you think you saw. Okay? We done here? We’re done here.” He catches Fraser’s eye. “If you wouldn’t mind, Mrs Legorno. Okay?”

“Thank you kindly,” Fraser adds as he follows Ray out, and they go off to the labs in search of their trace report.

***

**The Saulino warehouse job was one of our weirder cases, and that’s saying something. We got the lab report back on the rubber ducks from the packing crates: no drugs, nada, niente. Back to square one. Hey, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Gotta roll with it. Hunches are like that.**

***

Ray is sprawled on his half of the couch, frowning at the TV, one arm stretched along the sofa’s back, feet spread wide to claim the whole coffee table. He and Fraser have spent the day chasing leads on three different cases, and that’s still only a fraction of their active caseload. They look beat. They are beat.

Fraser is propped sideways, listening to the restless fingers tapping on the couch’s leather just behind his head. Tap, tap, tap-tap tap. Like Morse, but not Morse: the syllables of Ray’s thoughts, a code Fraser hasn’t yet cracked, though he counts the beats despite himself.

Tap, tap.

Twelve, thirteen.

He takes a swig of the root beer that Ray has taken to buying for him in the apparent belief that it’s equivalent to bark tea. It’s been a tough day; Ray has been more than usually combative and Fraser less than usually patient about it, so he’s here, watching Ray watch the game, as a sort of penance for his snappishness. Not that it’s much of a penance: it’s a long walk back to the Consulate, and he’s simply too tired to move.

More worryingly, he’s beginning to like the taste of root beer.

Tap-tap. Tap. Tap. Seventeen.

Ray glances across. “So we don’t got drugs,” he says, as if it’s an ongoing conversation.

Drugs. Drugs? Fraser flips mentally through their caseload. Drugs – the Saulino case. “No,” he agrees. “We don’t.”

“But we do got a dead body.”

“True, but a dead body does not necessarily imply maleficence.”

“Mal-whuh?” Ray says. “Nah, nah, never mind. Look, we got a body in work clothes, on the shop floor. A body, looks like a worker, not on the firm’s books, nobody admits nothing. You think he just accidentally-by-accident happened to get his torso smashed to pancake?”

“As a matter of fact I think it not improbable. Did you happen to notice the state of the crate winch’s ratchet on the warehouse’s east wall?”

“That thing you went over and licked? You gotta stop with the licking, Fraser, it’s weird and it’s gross.”

“Understood. But that degree of long-term corrosion might well suggest that the death, while no doubt tragic, was an industrial accident rather than a murder. It seems not unlikely, therefore, that the apparently random crates of rubber ducks left abandoned next to the body were, in fact, merely random.”

Ray snorts. “You think that ‘not unlikely’, huh?”

“I wouldn’t like to go out on a limb and draw definite conclusions without a full investigation, but—”

“Of course you wouldn’t. No out-on-a-limb-going, not for the guy that thinks ‘edgy’ is wearing long johns in a color that ain’t on his national flag.”

Fraser heads off the threat of a smile by smoothing an eyebrow instead. “Well, no, but it’s hardly a laughing matter, Ray. Causing death by industrial neglect could be a felony in itself, not to mention the possibility that Saulino Imports were using unregistered labor, given their failure to identify a man who appears to have been working there. The question then would be: if they had something to hide, why call the police in the first place?”

“They didn’t,” Ray says. “It was the accountant that called us.”

“The accountant?”

“Yeah, I got the whole story from her while you were busy with your ratchet buffet. She goes there once, twice a year, three times tops, does the books. She turned up early, crossed a corner of the shop floor on her way to the offices, saw the meat pancake. Anyone else might’ve known to keep schtum, but she called it in. Too late for a cover-up. Maybe the management rushed in, removed broken machinery, evidence, whatever. Maybe not. Too late to hide the body, though.”

“Ah. The winch arm itself was missing, along with all its chains,” Fraser says. “It would almost certainly be corroded right through.”

“Yeah, well, it’ll all be in the lake by now. Lost and gone forever. Soooo, it’s probably just a case of death by rust. Exciting stuff, out there on the limb. Fuck it, we’ll pull the Missing Persons, crosscheck with our John Doe, toss it to Health and Safety. We got bigger fish.” He pauses a moment, head on one side as if he’s waiting for contradiction, but when it doesn’t come he pokes a lazy toe at the stack of takeout menus on the coffee table. “Hey, you hungry? I’m hungry. Want Chinese? I’ll call, you pick.”

“I should probably be...” Fraser makes the universal gesture for “heading home”.

Ray slumps lower. “Nah, I’m too tired to drive.”

“You don’t need to. I can walk.”

“Yeah, right, and then I can pick you up from the hospital once Chicago’s finest are done beating the crap out of you. How many times we gotta have this conversation? It’s late, it’s dark. Take the couch.”

“Okay. Thank you, Ray.” Fraser watches Ray’s toes twitch in a triumphal dance. It’s impossible not to give in to someone so easily pleased by such little victories.

“So you gonna pick or what?” Ray says mildly. “I’m getting old here, waiting.”

***

**I thought Fraser was batshit crazy because he was Canadian. Turns out, Canadians are mostly kinda more or less like normal people. And, y’know, moose burgers just taste like burgers if you put enough ketchup on them. Turns out, Fraser’s not crazy because he’s Canadian. He’s crazy because he’s Fraser.**

***

Ray comes round the corner staggering under a stack of files that reaches above his head. Fraser goes up to take half.

“Here, allow me...”

Ray turns away sharply, dropping several folders. “Get off, I don’t need...get _off_. Look, just, just open the door, okay?”

Fraser holds the briefing room door open for him and clears space on the table for him to dump the lot. Ray slams into his seat, props his boots on the table, and grabs a file. For a while they sit and leaf through the paperwork.

Eventually Ray shoves his file of mug shots away and scowls at Fraser. “You gotta stop doing that, Fraser. You gotta stop...helping.”

“I’m sorry, Ray. I thought that with the excessive load, you—”

“Excessive nothing. I was handling it, I could handle it, I’m not a fucking pussy. Just, just don’t make me look like a pussy, okay, Frase? Not in front of”—he waves a hand at the walls—“everyone. The station. I don’t need them thinking that. Okay?”

“As you wish.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Ray sighs and tips his chin at the pile of folders. “Any luck with our John Doe?”

“No matches to any of these reports, no.”

“Yeah, I got zip. I’m calling it.” He hesitates a moment. “Thanks, though. For trying, I mean.”

Fraser nods and doesn’t point out that it’s Ray who—after the requisite bluster about palming the case off onto Health and Safety—has come into work on his day off. Francesca Vecchio once, on severe provocation, called her stand-in brother an obnoxious jerk, and sometimes he can be, but he’s the kind of obnoxious jerk who spends his downtime trawling through far more records than protocol demands, just on the off-chance that some grieving family somewhere might get closure.

Ray starts hauling the files back into the same stupidly tall pile. As he does so, a loose sheet of paper falls to the floor, and Fraser bends to retrieve it.

“Um, Ray? Did you see this?”

“What? C’mon, we gotta take all this junk back to Missing Persons.”

“It’s the picture from Mrs Legorno’s file, the artist’s impression. The portrait of her thief.”

“So it’s gotten mixed up. So shove it back in her file. C’mon, Fraser, let’s move it.”

“Ray? Ray? Ray? Ray?”

“ _What?”_ Ray exhales heavily, gives in, turns back. He glances at the sketch and narrows his eyes. “What the... You kidding me?”

“You see it too?” Fraser holds the sketch up, and they both peer at it.

“Okay,” Ray says at length. “Okay, so maybe, _maybe_ rubber duck guy is also tomato sauce guy.”

“It would appear so, in which case we might posit that his death, though apparently accidental, might not be unconnected to the theft of the recipe.”

“Yeah, but that’s crazy! Fraser, listen, that’s genuine nutsville. It’s _tomato sauce_. You don’t whack a guy for tomato sauce.”

“You might if you had links to organized crime and you felt your family honor compromised.”

“Huh.” Ray scratches at his stubble. “Legs Legorno. You think...? One of those guys we could never prove nothing against, but I’m betting there’s rumors. Hmmm, Stella might have the inside scoop. Worth asking her, huh? Yeah...let’s do it, c’mon, let’s go.”

He’s gone in another heartbeat, dodging out the door and round the corner. A second later he’s back, grabbing half the files, shoulder-charging the door again on his way out.

Sometimes he reminds Fraser of the smallest ptarmigan in the lek, the one that has to flap the most just to get noticed. (Fraser isn’t ever going to point this out, of course, if only because using words like “ptarmigan” and “lek” is one of the infinity of things that piss Ray off.)

Ray’s not a small guy. In cold hard reality, he’s Fraser’s own height, give or take. And yes, he’s a few pounds lighter and Fraser could take him down if he wanted, but that’s not what makes Fraser think of him as small. It’s the cockiness, it’s the cock-of-the-walk strut that little guys have. Even the bottlebrush hair, giving him that extra inch that he doesn’t need, shouldn’t need. He’s not a small guy, but he’s trying so hard to walk tall, be tall. Whatever he is in his own mind, he’s not tall.

***

**Back in the day I could get the girls, no problem. Well, I coulda done, I coulda had all the girls, only I had Stella, and I really loved Stella. I mean, _really_ loved her, like I didn’t even wanna think about anyone else. Okay, maybe think a bit, but not touch.**

**And then, once she’d taken a long hard look at all my years of devotion and thought, “Hey, there’s a guy worth dumping”, they sent me Fraser. And I’m telling you, kid, you stand next to Fraser, you might as well be invisible. Ain’t nobody gonna notice the wingman.**

***

Assistant State’s Attorney Stella Kowalski always makes Fraser a little nervous. He respects her, sure, but he finds her somewhat hard to like. And sure, she’s spent a lot longer looking out for Ray than he has, but still...

Sometimes, when he sees Ray in strong light, he wonders how long Ray’s been that old. Objectively considered—and Fraser can be objective about it, when he chooses—Ray’s not a bad-looking fellow, but there’s a smoothness and a translucency most young men have that he doesn’t have, and maybe hasn’t had for a long time. For his age—and Fraser double-checked his age back when they first met, digging up the original documents just to be sure that Ray Kowalski _was_ Ray Kowalski—he looks as if he’s been through the mill, as if life at some point hasn’t been kind to him, or he hasn’t been kind to himself.

And maybe none of it was Stella’s fault, but she was there all that time, and Fraser needs someone to be angry at, sometimes. Someone who isn’t Ray.

***

**Fraser had this kinda sorta job back then, a...whaddya call it? Job you get money for doing nothing. Sinecure, yeah, probably. Only they paid him in Canadian, so it was nothing for nothing. Mostly he hung round the 27 th, helping me, driving me apeshit, whatever—same like he’d done with Vecchio, I guess—but they made him do shifts at the Consulate now and then. They used to stand him outside just for people to take pictures of. I’m serious, they shoulda charged, shoulda stuck up a sign: “Defect to Canada! Free kiss from the Mountie for every signee!” They’da had a line round the block.**

**Yeah, so he was on official standing duty most of that morning. Vital importance to his nation, so I had nothing to do but wait. Sure, I used to try shouting, try waving, he wasn’t gonna budge.**

**I spent a lot of time in those days trying to get him to notice me. Sometimes it even worked.**

***

“So I got Stella on the phone while you were busy saving the world, and she tells me, yeah, the Legornos got links to organized crime, links up the wazoo. Nothing she could prove in a court of law, but if there’s someone been whacked, Legs ain’t way out the frame to be our whacker. We gotta go check out their place for the theft, anyway. Dief still around?”

Fraser nods. “I believe he’s currently keeping an eye on the lunchroom, yes.”

“Great, we’ll take him with. He can lick stuff and you can try acting human. You go get the wolf, I’ll go get the car. Meet you out front.”

There is, it turns out, very little of interest to be found in the Legornos’ kitchen, even when the remaining cookbooks are brought out for their appreciation. Fraser is busy trying to extricate himself from a painful conversation with Mrs Legorno about the pungency of different types of basil when he hears Diefenbaker whine from the yard.

“Would you excuse me one moment?” he says, darting to the back door. “Dief, what is it? Ray, come look at this.”

Ray peers at the grimy walkway where Diefenbaker is snuffling the concrete. “Yeah, okay, footprints maybe? Could just be scuffs. Looks like scuffs. So, wait, is this where you’re gonna sniff them and tell me the color of the guy’s eyes already or something?”

“Well, no, Ray, because that would be silly.”

“Silly. Riiight.”

“What I _can_ tell you is that the man who left these prints had a neuropathic gait. You see here, and here, the scraping pattern? It appears to have been caused by a unilateral foot drop, a loss of dorsiflexion, quite distinctive.”

“So the guy had a limp?” Ray says. “Can you tell if a corpse had a limp? No, no, wait, no, don’t answer that, I don’t even wanna—”

“We could certainly swing by the morgue and ask Mort whether—”

“Or, and here’s a crazy notion, Fraser, how about we _not_ swing by the morgue? How about we just get Frannie to bring our dead guy’s shoes up from Evidence? You can look at the, the, the—”

“The wear pattern! You’re right, the toe of the left shoe would be considerably more worn than the heel.”

“’Course I’m right,” Ray mutters. “The toe. I knew that.”

“You know, shoes are more important than most people realize,” Fraser says. “They can tell you a great deal about a person.”

Ray looks down at his scuffed biker boots. “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

“And it was a very sensible notion of yours, Ray.”

“I have those from time to time. Stop grinning, I know you’re grinning inside. Freak. C’mon, let’s go.”

***

**Thing about Fraser is, okay, he _is_ nuts. All that weird shit he does, the tracking and the knowing stuff there’s no way he could know, he does all that for real. But here’s the kicker: he’s also stupid-good at deadpan. Like, unfairly good. Took me forever to work that one out, and I’m still never a hundred percent sure. So if you’re thinking, is this guy serious or is he kidding, answer’s probably “both”.**

***

“Oh, hey, you – you free later, yeah? You’ll love it, I got tickets to the—”

The woman’s young, pretty, she’s just some stranger waiting in the bullpen for some reason unconnected to any case of theirs, and Ray’s in there like a shot, crowding her. She’s dressed in a remarkably brief skirt that Fraser, though he knows he’s being uncharitable, can’t help but assess as impractical for an early Chicago spring, and Ray’s all over the impractical.

Fraser hangs back a little, gives them space, pretends to read the Wanted posters, and he wonders, not for the first time, how Ray came to be quite so lousy at flirting. Not that he himself is any kind of expert, he’s aware, but Ray is _spectacularly_ inept. When he’s not trying he can flirt with anyone, anything—he can flirt with a _toothpick_ , for goodness’ sake—but not when it comes to a woman. He’s not a bad-looking guy (Fraser has ascertained the opinions of several acquaintances by now, and this is the majority view, though it isn’t the term he’d pick himself), plus he has a steady job, an apartment, a car, so he’s officially a catch, of sorts. And every time he spots an attractive woman, he hurls himself at her with the desperation of a penguin on a high-jump.

He’s somewhat institutionalized, of course. That could be it: a marriage that long has to put a dent in anyone’s dating skill-set. Then again, it’s just possible he’s throwing the game: his masculinity conspicuously asserted, beyond question, and his failure assured. Losing as a win-win situation.

Or, maybe they’re just practice leaps. Any time now, little blond penguin’s going to find his wings and soar.

Just not today. Fraser gives it another thirty seconds and turns the corner of the corridor to find Ray standing alone, a handprint visible across his cheekbone.

“Ready to go, Frase?” he asks cheerfully. “Bulls game, my place. I’ll stand you pizza.”

And the status quo survives another day.

***

**Hey, it was a long time ago. Things were different back then. Don’t pull that face at me! What do _you_ know about the nineties? Me, I had a reputation to think of, plus, plus I had Vecchio’s reputation to think of, the real Ray Vecchio’s, so...**

**Fuck it, you can call me a coward or whatever, I don’t care. Seriously, I don’t give a shit anymore. It wasn’t easy, none of it was fucking _easy_ , not even when I...when he...**

**Aw hell. Look, kid, I can rewind, spin you a story. That what you want? Make it sound like it was all sunshine and roses? Riiight, ’cause everyone loved us. Everyone was gonna be just fine with it. Yeah, sure, that’s exactly how it went down. Happy now?**

**That sticker you got on your bumper there, that rainbow sticker, you might wanna peel that off before you go some of those places you’re headed. I ain’t telling you what to do, but you know how the world is, or if you don’t know, I do. Everyone thinks they’re invincible till they find out they’re not. People round here, they’re okay. They know me, they know Fraser – hell, everyone knows Fraser. But out there...**

**I know, I know, it’s the twenty-first century already. Just, just be safe, okay? Enough trouble in the world that you don’t gotta go looking for it.**

***

Ray’s hair is brightened to grubby dishwater by the light of the briefing room window. He’d gone for the brushed-flat look this morning, but he must have forgotten because he’s running his fingers through it, and most of it’s stuck on end now, a look that’s half Tintin, half Trash Vortex debris, all absurdly endearing.

“Uh-huh,” he says into the phone. “Right, right. Yup.” He waits a while longer, scrawls something on a pad. “I got it. Thanks, Mrs Legorno, appreciate it.” He hangs up.

Fraser is sitting on his hands, because if his hands were free he might do something to set Ray off. He doesn’t think too much about what that something would be; he just watches Ray pull at his hair, and listens to him swear, and waits for him to get to the point.

“Okay,” Rays says finally. “Okay, so, in a nutshell: Mrs Legorno did not confirm that her husband and Saulino are rivals or even connected in business in any way whatsoever. She did not confirm that she and Saulino’s _wife_ are in any way rivals, except to point out to me that everyone knows her tomato sauce beats that bitch’s tomato sauce hands down, and everyone knows that bitch would have done anything to get her skanky hands on the recipe.”

“And we are to assume ‘anything’ includes sending one of her husband’s employees to break into the Legornos’ kitchen?”

“Yeah, but that hadn’t occurred to Mrs Legorno before, not unless she’s a great liar, which she ain’t. She got real pissed when I mentioned the link with the shoes.”

“Hmm,” Fraser says. “And she couldn’t have put out a ‘hit’, as I believe you call it, on a thief she couldn’t identify.”

“Nope. The guy was probably just small-time muscle doing his boss’s wife’s dirty work. Then next day he gets in the wrong place at the wrong time. Boom! Nobody owns up to nothing, ’cause his work papers ain’t legit, plus they don’t wanna get sued. Like we said at the start, accident.”

“As _I_ said at the start,” Fraser corrects, and instantly regrets his pettiness.

“Yeah, whatever.” Ray waves the issue away. “Point is, Mrs Legorno was real keen to tell me—though it definitely did not come from her, right?—that Saulino Imports got more premises than they got _registered_ premises, if I knew what she meant.”

“Ah. She gave you an address?”

“Couple of ’em. So here’s the thing: we could wait for a warrant, get backup, or we could go check it out. You, me, the wolf.” He glances at Fraser, grins at what he sees. “Yeah, okay, so the first place is quayside, let’s go with that. I’ll get the car.”

“Uh, Ray? You might want to...” Fraser waves a hand over his own head.

Ray bounces over to the window, sneers at his reflection. He yanks a wayward feather from behind his ear and shoves his hair into freefall. “So I’m gorgeous, what’s new? You love my hair, Fraser, you wish you had hair this sexy. C’mon, we gotta move.”

Fraser stares after him a moment. Then he remembers to shut his mouth, and follows him out the room.

***

**Okay, so it might’ve been a factor why I agreed to the Vecchio job in the first place. Not that I sat down and thought about it, not like that. Hey, I was young, I wasn’t thinking. We were so _young_. God...**

**But yeah, you know how it goes, they offer me this case, that case. “Be this guy for a while, be that guy for a while, whaddya say, Kowalski?” So they show me the personnel files, they got the mug-shot right there, Benton Fraser RCMP. I got eyes. And if I’m gonna be sitting twelve hours’ stakeout every other week with some random guy who’s probably gonna be an asshole anyway, might as well pick the eye-candy. Ain’t like I was gonna _do_ anything.**

***

Ray parks up by the lake they call Michigan, two blocks from the unregistered Saulino address, and they sidle through the quayside shadows to the warehouse’s side door. It’s a substantial building, if ramshackle: one large main structure plus a lower, slope-roofed extension to the west. Fraser glances up and down the alleyways: all clear. Ray is nodding up toward a casement window on the wall above the side-roof, with paint flaking from its frame. Fraser eyes it, estimates its width, knows that he won’t fit through. Ray might just.

Another check on the alleys: all clear. Fraser cups his hands, hoists Ray by one boot, feels the other kick against his scalp, maybe complete accident, maybe not. Then he’s watching Ray haul himself onto the roof—his T-shirt catching on the gutter—then leap up, balance one boot-tip on the corroded aluminum, and reach high and across for the window. The catch clatters to the ground in a shower of rust.

All clear. Ray grabs the window frame, swings his legs up and into the gap. For a horrible moment his shoulders stick, and then with a lithe twist he’s through, scattering shards of rotten wood, and Fraser hears him hit the floor inside and roll. A minute goes by, and then the warehouse’s side door opens. Fraser ushers Diefenbaker through, follows him in, and re-locks the door. When he turns back to the room, Ray has already checked the far corners, is circling back to him, signaling “okay”. Fraser looks around.

The main floor of the warehouse is covered with crates. Stacks and stacks of crates, piled maybe fifteen feet high, all identical, their labels nothing but strings of numbers. He gestures at Ray and picks up a jemmy from where it lies by the wall. He approaches the single unstacked crate, and with three careful strikes he prizes the lid loose and lifts it.

There’s a rattling sound, and a dozen or so flimsy yellow objects fall skittering to the concrete floor. He squints at them, then back up at the box.

It’s full to the brim, and what it’s full of is rubber ducks. Ducks, toy ducks, piled right to the top, and when he flails the jemmy down into the crate’s recesses he finds nothing but more ducks. He gives up, glances over at Ray, who looks half-crestfallen, half-amused. Fraser frowns at him, then shrugs.

Ray tips his head twice toward the second room, the smaller one around the corner to the right, under the sloping side-roof. Fraser nods.

Ray grins and lopes off with that cocksure strut, shimmies round the corner, gun in upraised hand. Tango, samba, flamenco be damned, this is Ray dancing, and Fraser, as ever, finds it impossible not to watch.

He feels Diefenbaker’s muzzle nudge his knee, and there’s a click from the main doorway, the door on the far left, the door he should have been watching.

***

**Turned out to be an investment scam, big one. You think organized crime, you think protection rackets, a little small-time murder and intimidation here and there, happy days. We knew that shit backward. Wrong, my friend, that’s old old ways, prehistoric. We shoulda been thinking corporate fucking bankers. Those crates, those rubber-duck crates, they were full of wine, paintings, all the stuff rich folks buy when they run out of orphanages to fund. Supposed to be full, anyway. Only, most of them were packed with diddly-squat, and those that weren’t were imaginary, and there were investors shelling out for those too.**

**Or that’s what they told me afterward. I didn’t get the half of it – hey, I’m the guy flunked math in college. I’d quote you numbers, but you’d call me a liar. Welsh turned it over to the Organized Crime Taskforce, and they got the credit for the bust. Never did get an ID on our John Doe, poor dumb nameless schmuck. I didn’t even care about that, didn’t give a damn by then. Stella got on the case: boo yah, no way were those jerks gonna walk with white-collar charges, not with her on the rampage. She had the head honcho on eighteen-to-life, and I didn’t give a damn. There was no jail-term was gonna fix _my_ life, or Fraser’s.**

**But back when we walked into that warehouse, we didn’t have a clue about any of that. Not a fucking clue. And hey, we were invincible. Right?**

***

Two of them, two dark-clad men, silhouetted for an instant in the doorway. Armed, firing as they run, semi-automatics, two of them. Five, six shots, eight shots, twelve: Fraser is counting even as he crouches low behind the open crate, even as splinters of wood explode around him and plastic toys scatter and bullets smash into the far wall.

Ray is pressed back round his corner, returning fire but shooting almost blind. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen: wild furious shots that fly wide, but the guy on the right is flung back into the doorway in a spray of blood and brain-matter; somehow a bullet’s gone home. The second man is still firing as he approaches the crate—seventeen, twenty-four, twenty-nine—still firing, aiming not for his unseen assailant but for the shattering wood. The crate is disintegrating, it won’t last another minute, and Fraser knows there’s no way he can make it to either the corner or the stacks, not through fire like this.

Diefenbaker darts out for a second, grabs a nail-studded fragment of the smashed lid, and pushes it at Fraser, who leans round the crate’s edge and hurls the shard end over end. It strikes the man across the side of the head and he drops to his knees, howling and clutching at his cheek, still shooting, but randomly now.

Thirty-three, thirty-four. Ray leaps for the crate, slamming into Fraser, pulling him down. He scrabbles for his glasses in Fraser’s breast pocket, lurches upright, and fires once. There’s a thud of flesh on concrete, and the man stops screaming.

No more bullets. No more screaming.

Thirty-five total. Or was it thirty-six? Fraser never loses count, but he’s lost count now. He can feel Ray’s full weight on his thighs, with Dief another dead weight across his lower legs, and he wonders how it can possibly hurt that much.

Ray is hissing, “Fuck, _fuck_...”

***

**The bullet smashed up his knee, nicked the femoral artery on the ricochet. He lost half his blood volume all over the fucking warehouse. This crazy great spurt of red like you get in the movies, like you don’t think happens in real life, not till it _is_ happening and you’re trying to stop it and you know that you can’t stop it, that no one can stop that kind of blood.**

***

“Fraser? _Ben?”_

And that’s when Fraser knows that his luck’s run through; that there was no convenient oil-drum rolling into the bullet’s path, no magic deflection, no clipping of the skin instead of the artery; that the blood hitting the far wall is his lifeblood, and he’s actually going to die this time. And he finds he’s not ready after all, he’s not ready for this, not for any of this.

***

**Yeah, I’m okay, I’m okay. Some not-fun memories, is all. I’m fine.**

**And he didn’t die. Well, obviously he didn’t die. He ended up in my apartment, which was almost as bad.**

**I thought he was gonna die. Time the squad cars pulled up, there was more blood soaked into my clothes than left in him. First week in the hospital, they all thought he was gonna die.**

**He was six weeks in there, then they kicked him out. Probably had a bunch of complaints from the other inmates – I didn’t ask. Fraser, hey, he’s housetrained, but he ain’t _normal_ housetrained, y’know? Igloo-trained, maybe. Whatever. He woke up, they kicked him out.**

**So Inspector Thatcher—she was his boss at the Consulate, did I say that already?—she put up this big fight, ’cause he was _her_ citizen, and she demanded custody ’cause Canada rules, ra ra ra. But Stella – well, Stell had been organizing my life so long, it was like her second job: She Who Sorts Ray Kowalski’s Life Out For Him because He’s Too Dumb To Do It Himself, and in her mind that made her the boss of Fraser too. So it was Canadian Consulate versus Assistant State’s Attorney, and that ain’t even a contest. Anyone with a lick of sense backs Stella against a momma grizzly; no jumped-up pen-pusher got a chance. Even Fraser was shit-scared of her. He always tried to hide it, but I knew he was, and she knew he was.**

**So, he ended up in my apartment. Ended up in my bed, too, and I got turfed out onto the couch. Which was okay, ’cause I had the TV there and everything, but it was the awkwardest month of my goddamn life.**

**I didn’t have to face Diefenbaker, at least, and Jesus god thank you for that. The Canadians mighta just about trusted me with one of their Mounties, but no way were they letting me take care of the damn wolf. Once he’d gotten discharged from the veterinary hospital, they kept him right there at the Consulate, red-coated nutjobs fussing over him twenty-four-seven. I swear they woulda given him the Queen’s Bedroom if he coulda made the stairs.**

**Bad enough just with Fraser at my place. Okay, yeah, it wasn’t so unusual for him to stay over – he’d kinda gotten into the habit of sleeping on my couch by then, more nights than not. And yeah, usually I liked the company. I’d never gotten the hang of living alone. But this time’s different. Now he can’t walk, can’t get to the can, I gotta wash him and bring him food and fix his dressings, and all the time I can’t look him in the eye, ’cause what do you say to the guy who took a bullet for you, the guy whose wolf you’ve gotten shot, the wolf that couldn’t hear the damn gun being cocked? What do you say to the guy who’s spent a lifetime running down criminals, who’s never gonna run again? “Oh, hey, Frase, thanks for that. Wanna try a wheelchair?”**

**So once he could sorta kinda get on his feet, he was dragging himself into the lounge, and we’d watch the game and just keep not talking. Yada yada, couldn’t stop with the not talking. Whole goddamn month.**

***

Ray’s back on his regular shift at the station, but he’s turned down his usual overtime, or maybe Lieutenant Welsh has vetoed it, and Fraser can’t work out how to object. Ray can be a motormouth at times, a hyperactive filler of silences, but he’s not talking now. He’s not sullen about it, not about to punch the wall—not as far as Fraser can tell, anyway—but he’s not talking.

He goes to work, then the physiotherapist turns up and tortures Fraser for a while, then she goes home and Ray comes back. They sit, and they sit, and the TV lapses into commercials and back to the game and back to commercials, and the condensation runs down the bottles and into the carpet.

After a month of this, Ray brings Diefenbaker back from the Consulate, sleek and glossy from weeks of Constable Turnbull’s cooking, one leg gone and another one stubbled where the cast has been cut away. Dief dashes three-legged to the couch, licks ecstatically at Fraser’s ear, scrabbles at Fraser’s chest. Ray stands watching, twitching, silent.

Fraser hugs the wolf close and waits a while for the words that don’t come. Then he says, “I’m sorry, Ray. I am sorry, but we need to go home.”

He waits a while longer. There’s no need to explain what “home” means: he knows that Ray knows. “I’m sorry,” he repeats.

Still no reply.

He can’t think what else to say. He buries his face in Dief’s fur and hears the apartment door slam as Ray storms out.

***

**Maybe I coulda stopped Fraser leaving. I’d done it before: stomped my feet, made him stay where he didn’t wanna be. I knew he was never gonna belong in Chicago, knew he was eaten up with homesickness, and I didn’t give a damn, I’d done it anyway. Only, I’d kinda lost the right to do that, that day in the warehouse. Kinda screwed up his life enough already.**

**So it was real fucking simple: he had to go, and I had to let him. And me, I’m the goddamn poster boy for rational thinking. You worked that out already, right? Grade-A genius, born that way. So I did my usual bright-spark thing: I went looking for someone to punch. Someone who wasn’t Fraser, ’cause, been there, done that too, and believe me it wasn’t pretty.**

**One thing you could say for the big city, always something going down. Almost always something. Just, not the one night I needed it. I coulda picked a fight with the moon in a puddle right then, and no son of a bitch was taking me on.**

**You can’t picture it? Look, I was thirty-eight going on eighteen. Life smacks you round the head enough times, you learn to smack first. You want the whole story, or you want me to dress it up for you, sound like a fucking hero? Shut up and listen. Okay, so there was a whole bunch of growing up I’d never gotten around to. I ain’t proud of that. I hit paydirt since then, got real damn lucky: I don’t got much left to kick against. Whatever. Maybe I’ve just gotten lazy.**

**Where was I? Stomping out, yeah. Last-ditch spot for any idiot who needs to get hurt: I headed to the gym. Nobody there either, no one in the ring. Didn’t matter. Ten rounds in, and the punching bag was kicking my ass, but I finally figured out I had one card left to play. Hell, it wasn’t like Fraser was gonna _ask_ for my help. Some people just ain’t the asking type. **

**Here’s the thing: he hadn’t said “he” had to go north to recuperate, he’d said “we”. And, yeah, I knew that meant him and Diefenbaker, but I figured I could just act like I thought it meant me too. And Fraser was Fraser, so he couldn’t refuse. That woulda been...uncourteous. Discourteous? Un-fucking- _polite_ , anyway.**

***

Thatcher claims the cabin belonged to her second cousin and is Fraser’s for the taking. He offers his back pay as security, but she insists that her cousin’s widow just wants the place kept habitable, that he’d be doing her family a favor, and she won’t budge from her story.

She and Stella Kowalski have run straight from battling to best friends forever, some kind of female solidarity thing that Fraser accepts as illogical but inevitable, and Ray tells Fraser that Stella told _him_ that they’re being stupid – that all men are stupid – that Thatcher could break her damn heart before any stupid man would catch a damn clue, and that he and Fraser are to shut the hell up and get the hell out of Chicago before she (Stella, or maybe Thatcher, or maybe both of them) changes her damn mind, okay?

So—since Ray has two years’ worth of vacation to use up and seems to think he’s been invited, and since Fraser can’t walk well enough to give any real conviction to his pretense of self-sufficiency—they do as they’re told and get the hell out.

***

**It’s the cold I remember most. The cold, and the flying. A little plane up to Yellowknife with these crazy frost flowers spreading across its windows, then an even littler plane out to who-the-hell-knows, then a beat-up SUV to the ass-end of nowhere. It’s...hey, I knew the place was big, everyone knows it’s big, I just didn’t know it had that much damn sky. I like it okay now, but the first time it was kinda...kinda threatening. Like I needed the buildings back just to hold the clouds in place, y’know?**

**Fraser, he still wasn’t saying much and he still couldn’t walk properly, but he knew where he was going. Hell if I could work out how, but after a half-million miles of white nothingness he found the place straight off, no hesitation.**

**Nobody else tried to stop him. Nobody pointed out what a dumb-ass idea the whole thing was. Dumb-ass ideas are like standard Canadian procedure, anyway – the Consulate coulda probably quoted chapter and verse at me: “All badly injured personnel to retreat to wilderness for least convenient recuperation possible, thank you kindly.”**

**I had a bunch of vacation time I had to take or lose, plus a promise of painful death if Thatcher caught me back in Chicago before Fraser was off the crutches. So I didn’t ask his opinion, and he didn’t argue, and we went out, long long way out to this olde-worlde cabin Thatcher had terrorized some cousin of hers into lending us till Fraser got back on his feet.**

**Which is where we found out we’d been set up. Or, _I_ found out. Maybe Fraser knew. I never asked about it. Gift horse, sorta thing, and he can be a touchy bastard sometimes.**

**And hey, here we are. Home-sweet-thousand miles from home. Kinda pretty, huh, when you get used to it?**

***

Fraser considers the place, measuring it against his expectations. It’s bigger than he’d supposed and in better condition too, with solid packing between the logs, and there’s a fair bit of firewood stacked in the woodpiles. A small wind turbine is whirling overhead, and there’s a modern generator in the lean-to, with an ax still head-down in the chopping block. Fraser has fished the key out his hat-band just in case, but the door is unlocked, so he holds it open for Diefenbaker and Ray.

The cabin’s main room holds a stove, a kitchen table, a couple of old armchairs, a fireplace, even a crate where he can put a television for Ray, once he’s had time to bring a set out from town and wire it up to the generator and sling up an aerial. A ladder leads up to an open, empty loft, and a doorway leads through a partition to a second room. It’s a good cabin. Not like his old one, different, but it’s good. It’s gotten dusty, to be sure, but it seems dry, with no marks of damp in the walls. No chinks in the roof either, as far as Fraser can see, but he’ll take a look in the loft tomorrow, when he has the energy.

He stashes their food in the kitchen cabinet and crouches on his good knee to check the floor for signs of rodents. When he glances up, he sees Ray in the doorway to the second room, turned back to him with that edgy what-the-hell expression he gets when he’s nervous enough to smack something or someone.

“Ray? Something wrong?”

Fraser limps over to the door and peers past him. Here, too, the walls seem intact and weatherproof, the floor dry, and there’s an old wooden bedstead with what looks to be a useable mattress.

“Ray?” he says.

“What?” Ray snaps. “ _What?”_

Fraser wonders whether he should offer to top-and-tail, sleep at the foot end, maybe even on the floor, but he’s had an exceptionally long day, he’s exhausted, and moreover he’s tired of negotiating with a man both unnervingly vulnerable and constitutionally incapable of backing down. If they have to end things here, so be it. It’s been a day of endings.

“Left side or right?” he asks bluntly. “Or don’t you care?”

Ray looks at him as if he’s stupid. “Right side,” he says, like it’s obvious. He’s spent most of his adult life married, Fraser reminds himself. Years and years of sharing a bed. Of course he has a side.

“Right you are,” Fraser says, pushing past him and putting his bedroll down on the left-hand half of the mattress. “This should suit us well enough. One has to appreciate a room so perfectly designed to catch the morning sun.”

Ray stands blinking another full half-minute. “Morning sun. Okay. Whatever,” he says finally, and turns back to fetch his own bedroll.

***

**It was all Y2K survivalists when we first arrived. Remember that, the millennium doom? Good times. Whole bunch of assholes who thought they’d be safer in the wilderness, didn’t know one end of a chainsaw from another, couldn’t tell two-stroke from Budweiser. We made a killing from refurb and resale of their gear when they slunk back to the cities.**

**Okay, no, I didn’t know nothing either, not at first. You see Rosita there, fixing your wipers? She’s been sharpening chainsaws since she was six. Her dad had this place, needed someone could at least change a spark plug and keep the store going till his kids were old enough to join the business. Then he got sick, went into the hospital and didn’t come out. Rosie was just a kid, her brother was off at cadet school, and her mom couldn’t cope, so I stuck around, bought into the partnership. We stuck around. Me and Fraser.**

**Hey, you need a snowmobile, I got a couple good ones this week, out back, good as new. Lemme know.**

***

To Fraser’s mind the cabin is remarkably well insulated, but Ray seems bewildered by the dropping temperatures. Fraser tries to explain to him how quickly heat can radiate into a clear night sky without the dubious benefit of manmade structures to act as heat-sinks, but Ray doesn’t seem to grasp the principle. That’s okay, though, because it’s been a long day and there’ll be plenty of time to teach him later on. He’d been complaining earlier about the blankets piled up by the bed, insisting they had a musty odor, but he’s not complaining now, so Fraser pulls the whole heap over them both and falls right into sleep, too weary to worry about anything else.

In the small hours, when Ray is woken by the three a.m. dawn, it turns out that the effect of latitude on day length is another thing he doesn’t really understand, another thing Fraser will have to explain to him some other time. At least he’s stopped shivering, though, and he’s dropped his tough-guy-sleeps-alone act and is pressed against Fraser’s back, stealing all the heat he can get. Within a minute he’s fallen asleep again, snoring softly against Fraser’s shoulder, his body curled around Fraser’s. And Fraser very carefully does not lean back, because this is fine as it is, and more than he expected. He pulls his folded sweater a little closer under his cheekbone and closes his eyes and sleeps.

In the morning—when he’s finally ready to accept that it _is_ morning—Ray yawns and rolls away onto his back and stretches out, claiming two-thirds of the bed, radiating the same unfocused hostility with which he’s greeted every new day since Fraser has known him. He says nothing, just lies there frowning as if he’s waiting for someone to sort his life out for him, and the silence expands until it fills the cabin.

Fraser sighs, pulls on his clothes, and goes to feed Diefenbaker and light the stove. When he hobbles back with coffee some time later, he finds Ray standing motionless by the window, dressed in pants and a blanket, looking out at the whiteness. He puts a tentative hand to Ray’s shoulder and passes him a mug.

“So we’re...uh, are we staying for a while?” Fraser asks.

Ray doesn’t turn. He drinks the coffee in scalding gulps and puts the mug down on the windowsill. He shrugs, and the blanket slips, and he doesn’t bother catching at it. He stands bright in the snow-reflected sunlight, still staring at nothing.

Fraser waits a while, then wonders whether to look away. He knows that it’s too late, though; that he ought to have looked away in the first place, right at the start. He ought never to have let himself notice that this man wasn’t Ray Vecchio, was nothing like Vecchio. That would have been the polite thing to do.

Ray turns finally—maybe it’s a minute later, maybe more, Fraser’s lost track—and fixes Fraser with the uncertain, ambiguous gaze of the nearsighted. He steps closer, bringing his face to within an inch of Fraser’s, as if he’s never seen him in focus before and isn’t sure what to make of it. He takes Fraser’s half-finished mug off of him and places it on the sill beside his, slowly, as if it’s not happening, or as if he’s not the one doing it.

Then he’s in motion, sudden fluid motion. He has Fraser by the belt and is pulling him toward the bed, throwing himself back and dragging Fraser with him.

“Okay,” he mutters, his face muffled in Fraser’s shirt as he yanks it out of the jeans.

“Uh...okay?” All of Fraser’s blood has shot south, and there’s not enough left in his brain to figure out the simple things, let alone Ray. Except that what Ray wants doesn’t seem to be that complicated after all.

“Okay,” Ray says, and there’s an edge of laughter in his voice. He’s wrenching at Fraser’s buckle, tugging it loose. “Okay, okay, we’re staying for a while. Okay?”

And he pulls Fraser down.

***

Afterward—a long time afterward, once it’s ancient history—they don’t agree about it. Everyone remembers their first time, right? Because that would be the polite thing to do.

Ray says it was the time he cut his lip on Fraser’s crooked tooth, and that’s where the blood was from. Fraser says no, that was later. The first time was the time he fell out of bed, and he remembers because he landed on his bad knee and split the scar tissue, so it must have been that time or at least around that time, and _that_ was where the blood was from, and anyway his memory is more reliable than Ray’s. And Ray says no, that’s bullshit, that was some other time. Besides, he says, whatever it was, it must’ve been good, and even if it wasn’t—like maybe it needed practice—they got plenty of practice, and that was good too. Even if they did fall out of bed now and then.

But that’s in the future, way in the future, once the memories and the remembering have gotten mixed up and ancient history is just a story to spin.

That first day, the real first day, they don’t talk about it afterward. It’s a companionable sort of not-talking, though, and Fraser finds he can live with that, and so, apparently, can Ray.

***

**So, yeah. Hearts, flowers, happy ever after. Maybe...**

**Oh, the dog? Nah, he ain’t the same one. It was 1999 we came north, remember? Long time in dog-years, wolf-years, whatever, and Dief wasn’t that young to start with. He was around a while, though. Always liked to pull a guilt trip on me, make out like he needed extra donuts just to get by. Wise guy.**

**Yeah, he did okay on three legs, even in the snow. About as good as Fraser did on his nearly-two. And sure, he liked to have me or Fraser break the trail first, but he’d always been the smart one.**

**Do I miss him, you kidding? I don’t gotta answer that. We didn’t mean to get another, but then Fraser had to take this one off of some asshole in town, this mixed-up puppy nobody else wanted, so he brought him back for me. Guard dog for the machine shop, that was the idea.**

**Some guard dog, look at him. Alpha macho, smiling in his sleep. Kids love him.**

**He ain’t a wolf or a husky or nothing. He ain’t a replacement. He’s just a pet. A log cabin’s cozier with a pet.**

***

By 2002, Fraser is fairly sure Ray isn’t saving up for a ticket south.

“I could go back, easy,” Ray says from time to time. “Chicago PD would take me back in a heartbeat. Nothing keeping me here.” It takes Fraser a while to figure out that this isn’t a threat, it’s a promise, or as near as Ray can get to a promise. Because it’s true: he could go back, but he doesn’t.

In 2004, they go down to Chicago to catch up with long-lost friends. They stay ten days. The faces are older; the city hasn’t changed much. Ray gets back on the plane home and calls it “the plane home”.

In 2006, Ray returns from an overnight run to Yellowknife and shoves some papers onto the kitchen table.

“Done it,” he says.

Fraser puts the lid back on the stew and turns from the stove. “Done what, Ray?”

“This. Whatever. Thought you might appreciate it. Doesn’t matter.”

Fraser comes over and examines the paperwork, which states that Stanley Raymond Kowalski is a newly certified Canadian national and a citizen of Her Britannic Majesty’s Commonwealth.

“I knew it!” he says. “I _knew_ you wanted to be a subject of the Queen.”

Ray doesn’t grin back. “Ha fucking ha. It don’t make me Canadian, okay? I’m not fucking kidding.”

Fraser nods. “Of course not. You would have dual nationality, I presume. And thank you, it is a touching gesture. I do appreciate it.”

Wrong thing to say. Ray’s expression deepens into a scowl, and he has that jitteriness that means he really isn’t kidding.

“Fuck off, Fraser. I just wanted my own damn name back, now that Vecchio’s back in Chicago. It don’t change nothing. I’m not a fucking Canadian, okay?”

Fraser adds “fucking Canadian” to his mental Venn diagram of Things Ray Kowalski Definitely Isn’t, along with “fucking faggot”, “called Stanley”, “gun-shy”, and “any shorter than Benton Fraser RCMP”. Ex-RCMP.

“Understood,” he says, but apparently that’s not the right thing to say either, because Ray is balling his hands into fists, and usually he’s looking to miss, but maybe not this time.

Fraser’s gotten good at this game by now, though, so he grabs the nearest hand just as it swings into a right hook, and he yanks Ray into the bedroom, hard, and shoves him down on the bed and holds him down and kisses him, hard and then harder, until Ray forgets all the things he isn’t and remembers what he could be, out here in the wilderness where nobody gives a damn about any of it.

***

**The RCMP invalided him out. Fuckers didn’t want a Mountie with a limp. Don’t tell him, okay, but I wasn’t all that heartbroken. Not crazy enough to say so, but I’d had enough of law enforcement by then. Enough of all the guns and shit. Enough of the whole damn thing.**

**He’s at the Visitors’ Centre up at Two Bears Lake now. Right now, since it’s Thursday and all. Coupla miles past the town, you’ll see it. He’s supposed to be advising on hiking routes and stuff like that, but they like to stick him in the gift shop ’cause they need the sales. Tourists come in, think they need maybe a map or a pack of beef jerky, come out with twenty-seven fluffy mooses and a family pack of souvenir snowshoes. Fraser’s just gotta flash his eyeteeth at them and the grannies crumble. Hey, he’s a good-looking guy, always was. Still is. Clean-cut kinda charm, hard to resist. Everyone loves an ex-Mountie – go up there and tell me you don’t.**

**So he’s there Thursdays, and the rangers call me round whenever an out-of-towner’s car goes down a snowbank or when they got a moose-versus-truck deal and they need the animal hauled out the tourists’ sight before they butcher and burgerize it. I got the machinery to deal with it. Plus, like I said, the burgers are okay.**

**Rest of the time, he runs wilderness treks, snowmobiling, that kinda stuff. Best licensed guide for a hundred miles round, if you need one. Nah, there’s not so many hunters these days – it’s pictures people want now. Moose and caribou and the northern lights, and they got Fraser to take them to the right place at the right time. Hell, it’s probably not what he planned, not what he expected, but who the fuck ends up where they expected?**

**He’s happy. I think he’s happy.**

***

Fraser glances out the window of the Visitor Centre to check the sun’s altitude: home time. Ray will be shutting up shop soon, leaving Rosita to finish the truck repairs. It’ll be maybe half an hour before he gets back.

Fraser waves off the last of the tourists, restacks a wobbly heap of ptarmigan plushies, and is out the door of the Centre before the manager can concoct any more ways to delay him.

***

**Have a good day now, and watch the road, it’ll be icy. Appreciate your custom. Thank you kindly.**

**....And there they go, sliding on the black ice. Idiots. No one ever listens to me. Well, I’m off home now, Rosie.**

**What? _What?_ You can stop snickering, I did not say it! Thank you fucking _nothing_ , is all I said. And even if I did say it—which I didn’t—it wouldn’t make me Canadian.**

**I’m just, y’know, undercover.**

**_Deep_ ** **undercover.**

***

It’s only half an hour back to the cabin, even allowing for the ice. Fraser swings into the driver’s seat, his bad leg making him a little awkward—getting in and out of vehicles is the one thing he’ll admit he can’t do as smoothly as he used to—and he fishes his cell phone from the lining of his hat. He flips down to “K”, where he’s always kept the number for the man who isn’t Vecchio, and he types the same text he always types.

_Coming home._

_x_

 


End file.
